Put Jeremy Corbyn on a train to Siberia, says Michael Portillo

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To the question what would be the train journey on which he would most like to send Jeremy Corbyn, Michael Portillo has a ready answer.

“I believe that there’s a very nice train that goes to Siberia...”

The comment raised a hearty laugh among a London audience attending a Q and A session ahead of the start this Friday of Mr Portillo’s Great Continental Railway Journeys: Series 4. For no matter how much the former Minister of Transport protests that he has no desire to return to the political frontline, he clearly still enjoys the cut and thrust of political repartee.

Of course there are many politicians - not least in Mr Corbyn’s own party - who would like to see the runaway victor in Labour’s recent leadership contest embarking on a very long journey to the wastes of Siberia, preferably with a one-way ticket.

The idea of train travel in Russia - particularly the epic Trans-Siberian route - may well be one that appeals to the Member of Parliament for Islington North. Certainly his ascendancy in the Labour Party has been welcomed in the Kremlin. What's more, it was in a carriage on the Imperial Train in March 1917 that Tsar Nicholas II formally abdicated; it was also, even more famously, in a sealed train that was allowed passage through Germany that Vladimir Lenin one month later returned to his homeland to spearhead what became the Bolshevik Revolution.

In the previous series of great continental journeys, Mr Portillo himself examined the role played by the railways at the close of the Tsarist regime – while also fitting in a heated episode in a Moscow bathhouse being lashed with birch twigs and pummelled by a masseur.

There are three popular routes on the Trans-Siberian from Moscow

He did not reveal to his audience at the Caledonian Club in London whether he felt a similar fate should befall Mr Corbyn, but on a more directly political note, he did voice oppostion to the Labour leader’s expressed aim to renationalise the railways in Britain. “I can’t say I look back with fondness on the unpunctual days of British Rail,” he said. “Generally I think that these things run better when financed through private concerns.”

Defending the decision taken during his period as a Conservative minister to privatise the railways, Mr Portillo said that whereas in 1993 there had been 700 million rail journeys taken in Britain that figure had now risen to 1.7 billion journeys a year - more than double - and that we are witnessing a “renaissance” in rail travel in this country.

Michael Portillo's journey took him through Austria on the Schafbergbahn

He also defended the large cutbacks to the rail network in the 1960s that had been made as a result of the Beeching reports, saying that the network that had existed before had been put in place at a time when there were far fewer roads and cars and rail had been the only way of connecting many communities.

That said, he welcomed the re-opening this year of the previously closed Borders railway route in Scotland and also revealed that the West Highland Line connecting Glasgow to Mallaig and communities that would otherwise remain cut off was his all-time favourite. “There is a social side to any rail network too,” he said.

A bit of a mixed message: as was his sartorial style. For a man once hailed by the true-blue right, the colour of the jacket sported by Mr Portillo for his Q and A slot was a very bright red.

Episode 1 of ‘Great Continental Railway Journeys: Series 4’ featuring a journey from Sofia to Istanbul starts on BBC 2 on Friday at 9pm (different timings for Scotland and Wales).